General Question

Anyone researched or making/drinking ionized water -- popularized by Kurzweil as an anti-aging elixir?

I’ve been reading a bit online and looking at different devices for making ionized water. Wondering if anyone’s dug deeper into the science and has opinions on merits. I know there are a lot of sites that say claims that it’s good for you are pseudoscience, but Kurzweil’s no idiot, so I’d like to understand the optimistic scientific perspective a bit I guess.

13 Answers

Your best bet is to go to the James Randi Education Forum and ask your question there. Just because someone smart comes up with an idea, that doesn’t automatically mean its a good idea.

I recently talked to a guy about hexagonal water, and he raved about the supposed health benefits. He even believed that a snowflake, which is original hexagonal water, if melted, and refroze, would assume its snowflake form again. That’s BS. A melted snowflake, refrozen, happens all the time. It’s a common weather phenomenon. We call it sleet. Sleet is an ice pellet, no sides, just roundish and/or oblong.

I’m extremely wary of any thing that claims to be anti-ageing. It’s natural to age, its simply part of the life cycle. You are born, you live, you die. End of discussion.

I have done a little research on the topic and although I feel Kurzweil to be an extremely smart person in many ways that has added a lot of good things to our world, I see no reason to think of him as an expert on this topic of alkaline water. Furthermore, I see no objective reason why that alkaline water would be good for you, nor why their alkaline water would be any better. At $40 for a month supply it is better for their wallet, that’s for sure.

When you drink water (or anything, actually), it is thrown into your stomach, where one of the most powerful acids in nature gets a go at it. The alkalinity of whatever water you drink will not be of much consequence. (I hope)

Interesting thought (link here)
“Taking calcium supplements or drinking alkaline water will not change the pH of your blood. If you hear someone say that your body is too acidic and you should use their product to make it more alkaline, you would be wise not to believe anything else the person tells you.”

My lurve to you for posting this question. I think it is very wise of you to actually research claims like these, rather than blindly accept them. Whole industries live of claims like these and of people not properly falsifying them.

The idea is that there are “ions” in this alkaline water that attach to “free-radicals” that are thought to cause the aging process. Really, your body has a very good defense against free radicals and any type of ion that you ingest will most likely not do much even if it did what it is purported to do.

I had a very interesting conversation with someone on Wis.dm about this very subject. I had convinced him of the uselessness of ionized water after 3 posts. For the life of me, I can’t remember the details of my main argument. Mostly it was the silliness of trying to create ions in tap water using a water “ionizer” and how there is no objective evidence that suggests that ingesting ions would remove free-radicals. In fact, I remember coming across a Cambridge study, I believe, that showed that introducing some metallic ions actually increased the rate at which free-radicals penetrated cell walls. I’ll have to see if I can find that again.
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Ah yes. The blood pH argument. That’s the one. Your body automatically releases pH buffers into your bloodstream in order to stabilize the pH. There is no conceivable way to change the pH of your blood unless your kidneys fail and you start drinking extremely basic solutions. Really, you excrete, or buffer, any chemical that has the possibility of changing the pH of your blood. Your body naturally reaches and tries to maintain homeostasis in the event of ingesting basic or acidic solutions. Not only this but there is no known causal link between blood pH and health.

Ionized water is just so much “snake oil.” Worthless. If you want to prevent aging, you primarily need to prevent errors from occurring in your DNA whenver a cell divides. For another thing, physical appearances from aging (like wrinkled skin) occur simply because your skin gets “stretched out” with use over the years. The only way to prevent that is to have all your skin periodically “tightened” every 50 years or so during your immortal life.

Looking into all the ailments of the human body over its lifetime, I’ve come to a simple conclusion; aging is simply the effects of multiple repetitive trauma injury over time. The human body is protected, fairly well until it is born, and as soon as it is born, it is subject to trauma. What traumas specifically depends on that body’s environment coupled with its inherent tendencies.

Example: when a baby is born, it is without signs of aging, of course. However, due to its inherent tendencies (sun lover, alcoholism, obesity,) over its years, that same “baby” will encounter various stresses that will inevitably adversely affect its physical appearance. Things such as too much sun, smoke/pollution, fatty foods, alcohol and other drugs, and even the inherited gene that fosters a tendency to be obese put serious stress on the body, changing the way it would otherwise look.

“Nature” and “nurture” play a role in the aging process, though, so that this same baby, though not carrying necessary genes in inheritance to be predisposed to such stresses, can also be introduced to them through the environment from which it is raised.

Examples would be a family that always went to the beach in the summer, never stressing the dangers of too much sun on the skin. Also a family that tended to tell its children to “clean their plates,” to the point of it being a forced action on the part of the child, a family with cigarette smokers and/or alcoholics drinking and smoking around the baby. These would create the same stressors for the human body, and over time, such injury, if repeated, of course, becomes repetitive trauma to the body, thus “aging” it from its original form.

Therefore, to me, aging is just that; repetitive trauma on the body. Some forms of such trauma are both avoidable and reversible. Not all, but if one wishes to actually “see” such changes in his or her own body, the first step is in realising how it got into the state its in now. Finding the cause could find the “cure.” However, with such a philosophy as aging being due to repetitive injury of the body, there’s then no such thing as “reversal” of the aging process. It is just another form of changing the body’s appearance.

I love all of the post from these so called experts that have never tried Alkaline Water. I really don’t think you all are putting on the thinking caps at night. Well it is proven that aspertame and MSG does reduce your IQ, so I would say the 80 billion dollar soft drink industry is full of Bull too. This one ingredient has causes so many disease but we don’t question that since the FDA approved it for human consumption. Really the US has the highest Medical cost in the world and the fewest water ionizers, Japan is just the opposite who’s selling snake oil now.

@FR07en I’d agree with you almost, my sense from recent ageing research is that the body’s capacities to heal_from repetitive traumas diminish. And that does seem attributable to DNA breakdown among other things. In our younger years we have all sorts of repetitive traumas and get over them at the rate they happen.
Ionized water? Who knows, seems like whatever that effect is would be overwhelmed by a jalapeño pizza, or a diet coke.